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Apparently, Jung discovered the observer effect (well ahead of his time!!), spent decades figuring out how to explain why cathedrals are vulnerable to weighty, skyborne shit using alchemy and astrology, then happily diddled his eager mistress and wife, one in each hand, before conducting therapy on neurotic women who didn't understand their husband's feminine desires.
Jung may have been a ‘smart man' with a crackpot vein, but Ruth Snowden doesn't strike me as being much the same, animus dominantur.
I'm sure when David Bullard was shot in that home invasion, his mouth curled into a surly grin as he lay bleeding on his living sofa.
His columns rest on a revolving stock cast of villainous politicians, on packaged outcries of corruption and incompetence, and references to his boorishly superior lifestyle. My favourite quirk is his love for Zimbabwe and the downtrodden people of Zim; I don't quite get the whole thing but it makes a great foil, akin to having a black friend who you showcase to your suburban parents whenever you can.
Ultimately, he's one of those people who likes slapping beehives then points at the large welts on his body, eyes wide, mouthing the words “See! I told you! Poor little me, just wow.”
(Minor spoilers) This book is about two things: individuality and civilisation.The characters are all caricatures of what it means to possess social individuality. In broader terms, to be different to those around you. Bernard is different because he's on the bottom rung of his caste, a rung that no one knew existed until he showed up. He is rejected because his individualised traits do not cohere with the rest of the caste that a part of. Helmholtz's difference is his superiority, an ubermensch amongst the elite. He's above everyone else. For Helmholtz, success is trivial, women are trivial, life is trivial; his place in society means little to him and so he has become aloof, rejecting comformity to his caste in favour of radical misbehaviour. John is different because he has no caste at all. He's and outsider to almost everyone's social circle, a true pariah. He's too white and civilised to be an Indian yet too emotional and unstable to be considered civilian. That same civilisation then took his mother from him, poisoned his moral purity and, in the end, refused to let him escape its grasp. Lenina, in fact, has no individuality at all. She is the perfect Alpha - beautiful, brainless, adamant in her pursuit of orthodoxy. Her suffering arises when John forces individuality upon her through his exclusive infatuation of her – and then rejects her scripted advances, undermining the stability upon which her conditioning rests. It is through Lenina that we glimpse the dire consequence of removing individuality in favour of stability, pruning the autoimmunity that individuality gives. Mustapha Mond parenthetically tells us that difference is suffering. Ironically, Mond is perhaps the most individualistic person in the book, and paradoxically its happiest. Why? Because Mond isn't actually different; because he is his own caste, his own comparison, his own society. He reads what he likes, dictates what he likes, declares his own morality – by his own admittance, he makes the rules. In a sense, he is beyond society. The illustration Aldous Huxley has painted for us is one of status anxiety, a critical feature of our modern world. It is what drives consumerism. It is what makes us jealous and angry at the success of others, and ashamed of our own failures. But what is failure without a comparison to success? Alain de Botton's [b: Status Anxiety 23425 Status Anxiety Alain de Botton https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1298417783s/23425.jpg 14280288] deals with this topic better than I ever could. In 1930, Aldous Huxley would have been aware of the rise of communism and the future it could promise. This book is in many ways a critique of that communism. The Brave New World is pointedly similar to how many people at the time described the ultimate outcome of successful communism – both the detractors and pundits; utopia and dystopia. Everything is easy, everyone is happy; to each what they need, with needs regulated closely. What Huxley truly felt about communism is best illustrated in the Cyprus experiment, perhaps. Is this book really dystopian, or is it utopian? What would Bentham have to say about the satisfied Alpha-Socrates, alongside the satisfied Gamma-Pigs? In 2019, a lot of the world that Huxley envisioned seems right around the corner. Designer babies, powerful escapist drugs made ubiquitous, paternalistic governments, insatiable consumerism...the list goes on. But the real lesson on offer in this book has been seemingly ignored: do we really want a world where individualism and its instability, its sturm-und-drang and emotional labour, has been replaced with happiness, easiness, and perhaps most jarringly of all, equality?
We often think of certain emotions having a particular colour. Anger is red, jealousy is green. Critics might call a piece of music melancholic, brash or aggressive. A sommelier might claim the experience of the tasting a particular wine can lead us think of nostalgia, masculinity, and notes of wet concrete. I once had a white rum from the Dominican Republic that tasted like bacon fat.
Why should our experience of reading prose be any different? I'm not just talking about plain metaphor. Writing can easily appear flat and lacking vibrancy like a chastised soufflé. It can be electric and fast, bouncing like an EDM track in your head, or nagging and slow like thick gorse. Just as our senses can stumble over each other, creating quirky synaesthesia in our conscious broadband, so too can written prose produce its own weird experiences.
Jitterbug Perfume is written like a Jackson Pollock painting and illustrated like an episode of Superjail. The story and characters, locations and sensations are all strung along like the floating pinpricks of fairy light, suspended in the night sky by Robbins' irreverent, erratic and disillusory prose. Each paragraph has its own smell and colour, a lecherous goblin coxswain beating its own languid pace and yelling obscenities at its page mates. It is a book to be tasted, so full of imaginative detail and filigree that an eye could never appreciate it all. I'd even go as far as say that some of his metaphors defy visual understanding (as the many-buttocked thighs of Seattle with have acknowledge lmao).
Curiously, no one in Jitterbug Perfume is egocentric or domineering. Few of the characters seem to know or care that they're meant to be holding up a plotline, readily enjoying themselves in sticky carnality and critical musings. Free-wheeling paragraphs lean out from the page to spritz us with and erotic vapour to keep us in a daze, distracting us from the sock hung over the doorknob as the protagonists take a literary five. It takes until the last third of the novel for the different subplots to even lift their head from the sheets and acknowledge they're all in the same room.
This is a book that needs to be enjoyed before it can be read. The cast will stamp their feet in frustration if you approach them with too serious an eye. The poetry will blow a raspberry if you try and question its melodrama. In order to appreciate the absurdist theme, the lewd topnote and the beet-red basenote of laughter that holds it all together as a base, you'll need to first ask yourself: am I ready to smell fun?
What if mankind could create robots so advanced, so hypersmart, that not only will they come up with their own wild definitions of intelligence and consciousness, but they actually make us humans end up feeling like we're worthless, meagre animals lacking ownership of all these updated faculties? Just, perhaps, as we view other animals now?
In this future the hierarchy of species has been shifted. Animals have been moved up to reap the benefits of humanism, whilst the humans have obtained god status. But in front of us, having skipped the evolutionary queue, loom these algorithmic entities that have now left us in dust as the Universe's new meaning-makers and trailblazers. They call the new aestheticians, the powerbrokers who define just about everything. Our historical, mythological rise to immortality has resulted in a boring, obsolete godhood.
As another reviewer has pointed out, Homo Deus is not a prophecy but an exploration. It is a cartographic meandering through the various scientific fronts that capture currently our futuristic interest, with some heady-yet-sobering potential apocalypses as their (largely) decorative outcome. It wouldn't really be fair to treat Homo Deus as a rigorous prediction of what our near or distant future will look like, and Harari even says as much. Rather, we're given a list of routes and destinations that our modern sciences can take us to, and the philosophical lemmas that march alongside them. The predictions in this book aren't always sensible, nor do they share a coherent time frame, nor do they really consider their own congruence. But, again, Harari is musing about the future, not prophetically foaming at the mouth, and that makes this book far more useful to us as the humans poised to receive our apotheosis. A rabid techno-Moses preaching the Grey Goo Gospel would have only earned him ridicule (though I guess radical students would love him).